A couple of options off the top of my head: art, research, athletics, the humanities

Or maybe the problem is that exchanging labor for scarce necessities only makes sense when labor itself is scarce.

Milking unicorns.

The vast majority of people do not work jobs that they enjoy, that is a middle-class indulgence and ideal that they don't even live up to; almost all their literature is about why they should be enjoying things that they don't or how to discover the things that they might enjoy, and they stuff themselves with drugs to make themselves pay attention and not want to die.

And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens.

Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already.

Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.